Alwyn Cosgrove, Craig Ballantyne and John Berardi, proof that the greatest men are not born in the USA

What a weird title for a post, huh? Well, there’s a reason behind. If you have never heard about the three gentlemen I mentioned, let me suggest you Google them and start reading. These guys are no rocket scientists (Berardi can get pretty geeky with food chemistry, though), they are fitness professionals that are helping thousands of people around the world to destroy useless concepts about training, nutrition and health, and shift to stuff that actually works. I think that what attracted me in the first place to their points of view was that everything they wrote made perfect sense, and yet it was politically incorrect. More of less the same thing that happened when I was introduced to Diamond Way Buddhism. But back to these guys, as soon as I began reading their stuff I was hooked and super motivated to put theory into practice. It was the perfect timing too, right after recovering from my toe fracture.

I started by testing Cosgrove‘s suggestions for interval training. I printed out his chart and gave it a go in the gym’s treadmill. Right from the start I understood what they all meant by intensity: while the workout looked easy (run for a few seconds and then rest), it totally tested my cardio fitness. I decided to try a weight training program but couldn’t decide between Cosgrove’s and Ballantyne‘s. At the end I chose the second one because it was downloadable, and bought it just in time for the “Cofla” contest.

“Cofla” is the word us Peruvians use instead of “flaco”, which means “skinny”. Some friends at the company I used to work in (a software development company, where at least 90% of the staff was male and a big percentage overweight) created that contest that lasted for two months and had for winner the person who lost the most body fat in proportion to their initial body fat (the first time they measured weight but then realised that body fat was a better guideline). The contest was great because it encouraged people to be active and eat well, at least for two months a year. Each person paid a participant fee, and the winner got the big fat amount plus a free lunch at a great seafood restaurant, where the final results were announced. People who gained body fat instead of losing it had to buy a round of pisco sours each for all the participants. I entered the competition in the summer of 2007. I bought Turbulence Training and got good results, but didn’t win the prize (I ended in a very respectable 5th place amongst 21 persons, 19 of them men).

I didn’t reach my real goal, which was going back to my lowest fat percentage ever, but I definetely noticed a big improvement in my physique and fitness level. I tried all Turbulence Training workouts, and then bought John Berardi’s Metabolism Advantage. His website precisionnutrition.com has become my #1 source of nutrition information and advice. The training program was good, maybe a bit on the “classical” side (lower body, upper body, full body splits), but effective after all. What’s more effective in the end is mixing programs so that your body doesn’t get used to a routine that becomes easy to perform.

I use weight training as my foundation for building up strength (as a means to live a long, healthy life) but I have always had a main activity. For almost three years it was taekwondo, until I finally left it because many things got in the way (I changed jobs and had to be earlier in an office that was further away from the gym, I moved further away from the gym, my instructors left the gym where I was a member). When my gym membership expired I felt like I had no reasons for renewing it and bought dumbbells instead (the ones with interchangeable plates). I trained at home every other day and kept on practising my kicks. At that time I started postrations too, a meditation that involves serious physical activity. Of course the aim of the meditation is to develop certain inner qualities but the by-product is stronger upper abs, shoulders, and arms, as well as increased cardio fitness (if done with intensity and in high volumes).

After a while I finally accepted my husband’s multiple offers to teach me kung-fu and we started training in our backyard. Fighting with my fists was a completely new experience for me, because we only used them in TKD for practising forms, and not when fighting (there were no points given for punching until a few years ago). Then we moved temporarily to my in-laws house, where we couldn’t train as frequently as possible because of the lack of room and time (the house was further away from my office, so I spent much more time in buses). A few months later we moved again. The new house was close to a big, nice park, so we included running in our workout routines. Alvaro started preparing himself for applying to the Australian Defence Force months before we came here. I did sprinting intervals after postrations.

A few months before coming to Sydney we began training kung-fu with Alvaro’s sifu, Walter. We trained on Saturdays in the park near home. Then, when I quit my job one month before coming, we started training a couple days a week in the gym were Walter works. As usual, I thought I wasn’t fit enough to handle the training, but I was.

Then we moved here and I spent two and a half months looking for work. Of course we kept training as much as we could, bodyweight exercises at home and some running at the park. Once again, Turbulence Training bodyweight program helped me maintain my fitness level. When I finally got a job, and got my first payment, I visited the three gyms that are near my house. I really liked one, the BBB (“bueno, bonito y barato”: good, nice and cheap), so I signed a 12-month membership. I got an appointment for a fitness assessment, mainly to measure my body fat after a long time of mirror-guessing. I decided to ask for a weight lifting routine, too, for a bit of variety. I performed the 8-week program they gave me, but didn’t like it very much. So I went back to Turbulence Training. I’m also doing boxing 2 to 3 times a week, which was a huge challenge at the beginning (remember I used to be a kick girl, not a punch girl), but I’m getting better at it.

I’ll finish Turbulence Training programs right before travelling to Peru on April. I know I’ll come back with a few extra kilos of pure body fat, so I’ll have to train hard as soon as the plane lands. I still have to decide between repeating The Metabolism Advantage or start The New Rules Of Lifting For Women, which I recently bought and haven’t read yet.

Going back to the guys in the title of this post, this is a summary of why I respect everything they write:

1. Their work is based on a critical analysis of scientific research, meaning that they not only do what science says works, but they compare that with real-liferesults.
2. They build programs that maximise energy expenditure.
3. They choose free weights and classic, effective exercises over machines and useless movements.
4. They always stress that nutrition is more important than exercise.

My first cooking gigs

Time flies when you’re having fun, so my year in the hospitality school was over very soon. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to give up my pretty decent salary, so I kept working as an IT professional on weekdays and as a kitchen hand on weekends. My first gig was with a teacher who owned a catering company, mostly for weddings. I learned that catering is a very stressful job, where part of the success depends on the facilities that the venue provides. You must be extra careful with temperatures, and extra accurate with timing. The worst thing is that you are not in your fortress, but in the client’s side of the court. I felt a bit like when I used to travel to the client’s office to develop or deploy software there. I worked a couple of times with this teacher, and was paid a modest amount of money which basically covered transportation.

The second gig I had was for one of the most important seafood restaurant chains in Lima. I worked there on some weekeds in October and November 2006. They operate in the most important bullring in Lima – Plaza de Acho – during the yearly October – November bullfight season. In my opinion it’s one of the things we shouldn’t have inherited from Spain, but the fact is that people love it. The bullring is full during the season, even when tickets can cost hundreds of dollars. It’s more of a social thing, you can see well-known politicians, journalists, actors, etc., with their best clothes in the dusty venue, which by the way is located in one of the most dangerous districts in the city. Of course is a great opportunity to make money feeding people, so this restaurant offers a three course menu for 70 soles (around US$ 23), that would normally cost a third or a half of the price. The venue is old (it was built in 1765, and it’s the oldest in America and the second oldest in the world) and so are the facilities used by the restaurant. Pair that with the lack of hygienic control from management and you get a not very germ-free lunch at a way too high price. But the restaurant’s got its reputation so it’s packed at lunchtime. It was a very good working experience for me, I learnt how to be fast in stressful situations with a fouled-mouth boss yelling at everybody. We even learnt how to sneak beers and desserts when he was not around. Again, the pay was extremely low, even for full time staff of the owner’s other restaurants who went for extra cash on weekends.

I got my third and fourth gigs through my friend Lucy. She had a bar and managed a restaurant and let me gain some experience in both of them. The bar was located in the most touristic district in Lima, but was not very busy. It had a more intimate atmosphere. Of course, the main thing there were the drinks, so there were only two people in the kitchen. I went on Friday and Saturday nights to help them, this included chores from mise en place to dish washing, and everything in between. The food we served (mostly appetizers, plus some carpaccios and dishes like lomo saltado arranged in a platter) was good, except for the sushi. The lomo saltado (stir-fried beef tenderloin, red onions and tomatoes with vinegar and soy sauce, served over yellow potato chips) was spectacular when head chef Maldonado was working there. Usually the kitchen was not very busy, so it was more like a relaxing thing to do on weekend nights, considering also that half of the bar staff were my friends (the owner had a phylosophy of trying to hire people she knew and trusted).

I stayed there for some months, and then came to Sydney to activate my visa. When I returned I asked Lucy if I could get some work experience in the restaurant she was managing, she spoke to the head chef and the owner and they agreed. That restaurant, located in the same district, is big and pretty well-known. The main theme here is Mediterranean cuisine, with some Peruvian influences. At that time there were 7 people working in the kitchen: chef, sous-chef, pasta chef, salad chef, dough maker, dessert chef, plus one all-rounder and two dish washers. It’s the biggest and best organised kitchen I’ve ever worked in. You could tell that the owner is a chef herself because everything was really well planned and controlled, from portion weight to plating pics and instructions. I got there after work and didn’t stop working until around 11 pm, when we had a dinner break. After that I helped a bit more with some things for the next day and left the place around midnight. More than knowledge, I gained practice working in a very busy kitchen, this time for a boss who treated staff with respect.

Sadly, that was my last cooking gig. Working for others, anyway. From April 2006 to August 2007 I sold desserts in my office (sometimes I doubled the quantity because my sister sold some in her office). The two things I really enjoyed about that were planning which desserts to prepare for the following week (I usually made a batch of muffins and one of cakes/mousses/cheesecakes or pies each day) and receiving feedback from the customers. I learned that the best feedback was non-spoken: it was the amount of time that I had the desserts sitting on my desk. Sometimes they would dissapear within 30 minutes I arrived to the office, sometimes I had to do a bit of marketing (emailing or calling people to offer the desserts of the day), and this helped me analyse the behaviour of clients. Good stuff.

How my bodyfat went logarithmic… and back to normal

Around June 2006 I had a bit of a problem. I had a taekwondo test to get a new belt, which included a fight against a more advanced student. Everything went well until I accidentally kicked my oponent’s knee with my big toe and I felt pain. There’s lots of pain involved in contact sports, so I just glanced briefly at my toe and noticed that it was twisted. I knew there was something wrong, so I stopped and stepped aside. The Korean referee checked my toe and pulled it back to its place. I limped to where some friends were and sat down, one of them, who is a doctor, told me that since I could move it, chances were that it wasn’t broken. I stayed until the end of the test (of course, I didn’t have to break boards due to the circumstances), went downstairs, took a shower, went to the ground floor, got out of the gym and took a taxi to the clinic.

Once there, a nurse asked me what was wrong and sat me down in a wheelchair. “There’s no need” I said, but that was the procedure. The resident traumatologist had a look at my toe and sent me for X-rays. When they were ready, he told me “it’s broken”. I couldn’t believe it, I had never ever had anything broken. He showed me the image of my broken bone. A huge “X” all over the phalange confirmed it was seriously broken. The doctor plastered my foot up to the middle of the calf, while I called my mom to tell her the news. I told her to buy me crutches and wait for me outside of the house. I took a taxi, went home and spent the next two weeks there, working in my room.

I was in bed or at my desk most of the day, with the foot up, alternating work with TV (only changing between Discovery Travel & Living and elgourmet.com). I went downstairs three times a day, to eat the delicious meals that my mom cooked for me. Of course, I was getting spoiled, which meant that besides creamy soups and great stews I also had some tasty bread and sweet treats. Needless to say, I gained lots of weight (luckily, I don’t like tight clothes, so I didn’t have to buy new pants). I was still going to my cookery classes, but I had to miss the final exams and reschedule them. But I couldn’t avoid tasting my friends’ dishes for their final exams… lots of calories and zero physical activity.

After two weeks I had an appointment with the doctor to check the healing process and I asked him to take the plaster off. He told me the average time was between 4 and 6 weeks but I insisted and he agreed. I still had to wrap my foot and walk on crutches but I felt much more free. Of course I still couldn’t work out for a while so my fat percentage kept increasing.

The healing process was slow but eventually I went back to training, first doing some cardio (taebo, body combat) and weight lifting and a few weeks later taekwondo, very carefully and with martial arts shoes for a bit of protection. Slowly I burned all the fat again. My toe still hurted for a long time, so I could never practise TKD with the same intensity as before.

How things led me to cooking again

During all this time (school, uni, first years as a professional) I cooked once in a while. My favourite dishes to prepare were cebiche (raw fish marinated in lime juice with onions, chillies, sweet potato, and corn) and pasta. I baked desserts once in a while, too.

As mentioned before, I had a new friend called gastritis, who magically appeared around the time when I started traveling for work. Whoever thinks that traveling as part of your job is cool has obviously never done it or has a job that doesn’t involve programming software in the client’s office. Anyway, I had a few trips over the world, I really enjoyed having the opportunity of visiting places like Hong Kong, but I hated the stress and long hours that were involved in almost all of my trips.

On June 2005 I was in Mexico City, programming an accounting software and wondering what should I do with my life. As I left the office at lunch time and went to this cool restaurant in which you built your own salad with really yummy ingredients, it stroke me like lightning. I knew I wanted to cook for a living.

I stayed a few weeks in Mexico and after getting home I started getting quotes from all cooking schools I knew of. Le Cordon Bleu was my first choice but it was really expensive and classes were only at daytime (meaning I would have had to quit my job and lose the money income I needed for the tuition fee). Most options were unviable because of the starting times but there was this school just a block away from my office with a one-year program in which classes started at 6:30 pm. That sounded perfect, so I started studying on September 2005. I told my boss that I wouldn’t be able to travel anymore during the next year because I had enrolled in a course (I didn’t mention what kind, but he eventually found out).

I was very short of time at that moment but still managed to train, work, study, be in a band, and have a boyfriend. Soon after starting the program I began preparing desserts and selling them at my office and my sister’s office. So my typical day was something like this:
6 am: Wake up
7 am: Taekwondo or weights
8 am: Take a shower and go to the office
6:30 pm: Get out of the office, walk 100 meters, wait until being able to cross safely the Javier Prado avenue, enter the cooking school, change my clothes and go into the classroom/kitchen
Anywhere between 9:30 and 11:50 pm: Go home. Three days a week prepare desserts and package them.
Go to sleep.

I had lunch with Alvaro (my current husband) on Wednesdays and spent more time with him on weekends. On Saturdays, after going to the gym, I met him in his kung fu class and then we went to his house. On Sundays I played tennis, had lunch and went to rehearse with the band. Alvaro went with me and read a book or something while we rehearsed.

This went on for a while until my energy was completely depleted. First I stopped playing tennis, then I started skipping training days. I gained weight as a consequence of cooking and tasting food every day, but I tried to adhere to my eating and training plans outside from the classes. Later I quit the band.

I noticed a few things changing within me during that year (besides my body fat, of course). One is that I became increasingly interested in nutrition. I began to think that maybe that was another career path I should think about (I still think that, but haven’t done anything about it yet).

The other thing is that my palate evolved very quickly as a response to constant exposure to prime quality ingredients and dishes prepared by top chefs. While it was true that my interest for highly processed foods decreased as a result of my healthy eating awareness, my tastebuds started to demand better prepared food. This is what anyone would from cookery students, but I was surprised to see that the vast majority in my class chose KFC for group lunches and fried super fresh salmon and sole sashimi as soon as the Japanese Cuisisine teacher left the kitchen.

I began to truly appreciate all dimensions of food and wine: smell, texture, taste, depth, contrast, temperature, harmony, layout, colour, etc. Naturally, I started to expend more money, both when eating out and when buying groceries for cooking at home. My family and Alvaro got some side effects too: yummy food and body fat increase.

How things changed

University was over and I started to work. My eating habits stayed more or less the same for some years, although I was a bit more concerned about my physical looks and I joined a gym for the first time. I don’t remember how many months I went to that particular gym but it did had an effect on me, maybe not much physically but definetely in my attitude towards exercise and health. This was on 2000, on 2003 my sisters and I joined another gym where I discovered Body Combat (they called it something different because they weren’t licensed by Les Mills) and spinning. This made a huge difference for me, physically and mentally. I was hooked with exercise. That gym was small and in a not very good location, so we started looking around for other options. We went to a few and asked for free trials (to keep exercising for free) and finally one of my sisters and I signed a contract with Gymdo. My other sister went to Curves and stayed there for a while.

Gymdo changed my life. It’s one of these small gyms in where you can feel the vibe going on. Apart from weight training they offered the whole range of Les Mills programs plus yoga, boxing and taekwondo (hence the name of the gym). They also had sauna facilities, a massage therapist and free consultations with a nutritionist. I started doing some weight lifting, spinning, taebo and Body Combat. I booked an appointment with the nutritionist and had my body fat measured, both first time experiences. My sister went through this too and we opened our eyes to our food intake reality. We came home with our personalised diets and asked our mom to adhere to them (because, even when we were all grown up and working, as most of Latin Americans, we still lived with mom and dad). Our lifestyle changed dramatically, in fact all our family’s lifestyle did, because they had no other choice.

We felt so energetic that we went to the gym almost every day and started enjoying the benefits of it. In October 2004 I gathered the courage to go to a taekwondo class. I had to overcome my lifelong fears of not being fit enough for anything, and I loved it. I ditched almost everything else from my training, except weight training. Taekwondo made me more confident, more agile, fitter, stronger, and leaner. In fact, my lowest fat percentage ever was 16.8 (measured in a not so reliable Tanita scale), during a hard training period.

My health improved a lot, too. I was no longer constipated and I got sick less often. I got a new condition: gastritis, but that was stress-related and aggravated by several cups of instant coffee a day. Just to let you know, receiving a kick in the stomach when you have gastritis is not very nice. Try to avoid it (the gastritis, not the kick!).

How things got worse

As I said before, my mom was a working mon. In fact, she worked hard for 33 years of her life. She was a very efficient executive assistant who used to get home late at night and still had energy to cook dinner. Having inherited my grandmother’s cooking abilities, she’s one of the best cooks I know, even when I tease her about never measuring up the ingredients. Mom introduced me to some dishes that educated my palate and gave me culinary culture, so to speak. Beef Stroganoff, Fish in Meuniere sauce, and Spaghetti alla Carbonara were amongst everyday dishes.

In the nineties our country had a big change. Alberto Fujimori was elected president, he killed some people, stole some money, pretty much ended with terrorism, and stabilised the economy after a disastrous 5-year period of logarithmic inflation, courtesy of Alan Garcia. I’m not gonna talk about all of that stuff, I’m just gonna say that as a result of having a healthier economy and very low import taxes, the supermarkets stuffed their shelves with all kinds of colorful and dangerous packages of processed food. All the major fast-food franchises opened shops everywhere and soon we were new victims of Burger King, Pizza Hut, Domino’s, Dunkin Donuts, etc. (KFC was probably the first fast food chain to get to the country, back in the eighties). Of course, working mothers, including mine, chose to feed the family with the convenient and cheap processed foods.

So for some years of my life a typical dinner would be Kraft mac and cheese plus liters of carbonated drink and donuts for dessert. We would snack on marshmellows or Combos (those pretzel flavoured cilinders filled with “cheese” cream) or Pringles. We didn’t each many salads, and fruit was usually covered with condesed milk or whipping cream, or added to Kellog’s cereals and chocolate milk for breakfast. When we went shopping we always ate something afterwards, a burger with fries and a milkshake in Sandunga (no longer in business), pizza in Pizza Hut, a super sandwich with fries and ice cream in D’onofrio (the most popular Peruvian ice cream brand, now owned by Nestle), etc. No wonder I was overweight and had so many health issues, including severe constipation.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I do not blame my mom because that’s what any person in charge of feeding a family would do when short of time. I do not understand why I did like that kind of foods, but thankfully I can’t stand them anymore.

During high school I did yo-yo dieting as a sport (just kidding). I tried all kinds of fad diets with results that would last only for a few days and didn’t make me feel better at all. Some diets were “alright”, I starved myself eating salads with not much protein and definitely any flavour, but there wasn’t a major health risk involved. However, there’s a particular diet that got me actually sick: the only fats diet. I could eat salami, ham, beef, sausages, cheese, etc., but no fruits or vegetables whatsoever. At the beginning I thought “this is great” but on day two I started feeling the consequences in my liver.

I remember bringing half of a roll with light Philadelphia cheese and a small sachet of fruit juice for my break at school. That’s all I eated between breakfast and lunch (at 3:30 pm). Oh, and at that time anybody would drink water during the day. Bottled water didn’t exist and parent’s didn’t send their kids with water containers to school. Again, another trigger for my constipation issues. Then I got home and if I was not in a diet I would eat my auntie’s home-cooked lunch, and a processed or fried (or both!) dinner. The snowball just got bigger day after day.

Not everything was that terrible. I must admit that traditional dishes were also included in the menu. While they are not super healthy (Peruvian food has a serious overload in carbs), homemade food is always healthier. At some point my mom started buying less carbonated drinks and more Kool-Aid kind of beverages. Later, she started preparing lemonade, apple juice, orange juice, “emoliente” (a barley beverage with lemon, flax seed and sugar), etc.

After graduating from high school all I wanted to be was a Graphic Designer. Somehow I forgot all my childhood episodes with cooking and I thought that my future was more related with my artistic interests. However, the family suggested me to become a Systems Engineer and I agreed. As soon as I started studying I realised the big mistake it meant but what’s done it’s done.

My years in university were not very different from the previous ones. Only that there was a lot more alcohol involved. Sometimes I had to stay at uni several hours a day and I chose a soda and a bag of really sweet biscuits for lunch. My ex-boyfriend used to work at Burger King (Hungry Jacks in Australia), so I ate there pretty often. When we became addicted to Duke Nukem we would buy potatoes, sausages and eggs, and prepare “salchipapa” (sliced and fried sausages with chips, plus a fried egg on top, tomato sauce and mayo) to eat between gaming sessions. Friday homework nights with my friends were always Friday pizza nights. You get the picture.

How it all developed

See, I come from a country (a region, if you wish) in which food is usually the center of attention. I was born in Peru, South America, where, generally speaking, everybody loves to eat. There’s a whole social aspect around eating, we get together for all meals: breakfast with the family, lunch with colleagues at work or friends at school/uni, dinner again with family or friends. Each special event is celebrated with food and we make a big deal about eat. Each time we eat, we talk about what we’re going to eat at night, the day after, on the weekend, etc. Many people outside from Latin-origin countries (because I believe the situation in places like Spain and Italy are similar) may think “that’s the way we feel about food, too”, but believe me, it’s a very different perspective. There are several theories about why things work this way, personally I think that in South America the causes may be a combination of being poor (and therefore appreciating food more than richer citizens of the world) and having great tasting food.

That being said, on top of this “genetic” interest for food, I come from a family of great cooks. My grandmother had a ravioli business (really strange choice considering that she was Japanese), that unfortunately didn’t exist anymore by the time I was born. However, I had nine years of my life to taste her wonderful dishes. Two of them are tattooed in my memory: “sustancia” and “aguadito de choros y pollo”. The first one I’m sure many people wouldn’t like because it was nothing more than a soup with cow liver (which I must confess I like) and various veggies that my granny used to blend so that we wouldn’t object eating it. I think the blending thing was done mostly for my sisters because I wouldn’t have minded eating the soup with the liver pieces floating around. The other dish, “aguadito”, is a kind of really thick soup where the main ingredients are rice and coriander. The rice is cooked in broth, so that it results in a soupy consistence (hence the name, since “aguado” means watery), garnished with diced carrots, peas and diced potatoes, and with some sort of animal protein, generally chicken. My granny used to add black mussels (“choros”), too, which gave her aguadito that special taste that hasn’t washed off my memory yet.

When I was a little girl and stayed at home on school holidays, I used to watch Teresa Ocampo (a Peruvian celebrity chef at that time) on TV with my grandmother. That’s one of my earliest memories, which should have hinted me on my career choice when I left high school, but unfortunately didn’t. I also used to prepare really simple salads (lettuce, tomato, lime juice and salt) and leave them in the oven (turned off, of course) for one of my aunties, who used to come home from work for lunch. Later on, when I was old enough to use the stove, my granny taught me how to prepare pancakes. On weekends my sisters and I would prepare sandwiches, omelettes, pancakes, salads, and coffees, and sell them to my aunties, uncle, and mom. For us it was just a game (although we did earn some coins re-selling the grown-ups the food they had bought in the first place), but again, this should have hinted me on what kind of profession I was meant to be involved with. Anyway, there’s no point in having regrets.

When we got home from school we had lunch and my aunties’ house (which was right besides our house) because both of my parents worked full-time. When my granny passed away, the oldest of my aunties was the official cook. She used to be a great cook, too (nowadays she doesn’t cook much anymore because of age issues). I remember her “torta de galletas” (biscuit cake), “olluquitos” (a Peruvian tuber cooked traditionally with “charqui” or alpaca jerky, but she used to cook it with beef and Peruvian feta cheese), and “tallarines blancos” (penne with bechamel sauce and tuna). My aunties had these fixed-food days thing going on: soup on Fridays (yep, just soup and a plate with rice) and beans on Saturdays. I still remember all of the flavours and wish I can come up with the exact recipe one day.

How it all started: my relationship with food and physical activity in the early years

My obsession with food started at a very young age. You can tell by the way I looked during my infancy and childhood, always overweight and somewhat bipolar (not that there’s necessarily a correlation between the two, but still worth mentioning). I can’t remember a single time when my mom, granny or aunties had to threaten me in order to finish my food. They were happy because, as most old-fashioned ladies do, they thought that chubby kids were healthy kids.

That was far from true. I did enjoy eating but my extra kilos made life sometimes miserable. For starters, Physical Ed was a nightmare. I was totally unfit, even when my parents paid for sports classes during summer school holidays. I even failed Physical Ed once during Elementary School. I think that was when I hit ground and said to myself “hey, this can’t go on”. Gradually I started getting fitter as I got more involved with sports. The first one I ever took seriously was softball, in the summer of 1989. The trainers were two ladies (one was fit and the assistant really overweight) that had been trained by men in their youth, so they were tough. The training consisted in:
Running 9 laps
Bodyweight exercises (pushups, crunches, etc.)
Ball throwing drills
Match

By the time I got home I was totally exhausted. Unfortunately this only lasted for one or two months, three days a week. It did help me get fitter but I was nowhere near the fitness level I needed to shake off the excess weight. I played tennis on and off but I wasn’t very good at it. Correction: I sucked. Now it’s one of the few sports I really love (and I don’t suck anymore) but at that time I just wasn’t consistent with it. The next sport I picked was basketball. At that time I was one of the tallest in the class and for the underdeveloped thinking of that time, “tall” meant “able to play”. I started training with the class team and this made me a bit fitter. Physical Ed was no longer a full-time nightmare, only a two-time nightmare: during volleyball season and long-distance running. But I actually enjoyed basketball, circuits, long jump, and “taburetes”, those stackable bench-looking wooden things you had to jump over in different fashions. I lost some weight and became fitter (that does not mean “fit”, only not as unfit as before), but my nutrition didn’t improve that much.